High-Speed Reconfigurable SIGINT (HiReS) System for Large Time Bandwidth Product

Traditionally, a SIGINT system requires special-purpose hardware (both RF and digital) and custom-design algorithms to rapidly and reliably detect targeted signals of interests known a priori. However, recent advances in wireless communications across the globe, especially low-cost software defined radios and their wide availability, readily allow our adversaries to devise and dynamically change communication schemes and patterns that are inherently much harder to detect using such conventional SIGINT means. Consequently, a new SIGINT system is needed that can process in as near real-time as possible a wideband spectrum (500 MHz+) that will likely contain a mix of known and well-behaved signals as well as unknown signals with unpredictable properties and behaviors. We propose to develop, implement, and demonstrate a novel High-speed, dynamically Reconfigurable Signals Intelligence (HiReS) system with minimal latency based on COTS Digital Signal Processing (DSP) hardware base to simultaneously handle 100s of diverse, possibly overlapping signals for multi-functional situational awareness. The innovations of the proposed HiReS system consists of: (i) robust, computationally efficient signal acquisition and classification algorithms friendly to parallel processing hardware architecture; and (ii) highly parallelized COTS-based signal processing hardware platforms based on a mix of FPGAs, DSPs, and GPUs.